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THE N YORKER, FEBRUARY 17 & 24, 2014
flesh and fantasy
World cinema, contemporary and classic, at Lincoln Center.
the south korean director Hong Sang-soo's latest film, "Our
Sunhi," opens the "Film Comment Selects" series at Film Society of
Lincoln Center (Feb. 17-27). It arrives just four months after the New
York Film Festival screening of his previous work, "Nobody's Daughter
Haewon." Late in the last decade, Hong shifted his strategy toward ultra-
low-budget films. In the process, he increased the pace of production and
also liberated his artistic voice, filming with freer, more audacious strokes.
Yet American distributors have been slow to keep up with his output.
Series such as this one, which highlight undistributed new films, take up
some of the slack.
Like many of Hong's films, "Our Sunhi" centers on a milieu close to
the director's own---that of struggling filmmakers racing against time
(Hong is fifty-three), whose artistic efforts and romantic crises overlap.
The title character is a twenty-something woman who
returns, after a long and unexplained absence, to her
university in Seoul, to ask Dong-hyun, a film professor,
to write a recommendation for her planned study abroad.
Waiting for the document, Sunhi crosses paths with two
other filmmakers from her past---Jaehak, who is living
apart from his wife, and Munsu, a former lover whom she
accuses of exploiting their love story in his low-budget
movie---who join the professor in avowing their passion
for her.
Hong is no psychologist, but, rather, something of a
musician. His graceful images render even the simplest
setup---a woman walking alone, two people seated face to
face---lyrical and dynamic. In extended takes that run as
long as eleven minutes, he traces the dryly comical course
of his characters' lives through uncanny recurrences, high
and low (involving an old pop song, lofty philosophical
dicta, and deliveries of takeout chicken). The probing
conversations collapse into silences that expose rigid
mores and resound with unexpressed emotion. Through
small-scale action, Hong conjures long and troubled
spans of life that offer only one way out of frustration---
the imaginative power of immediate experience.
The surrealistic 1983 drama "City of Pirates"
(Feb. 26), by Raúl Ruiz (who died in 2011), thrusts its
imaginative artifice to the fore. (It's one of a handful of
revivals in "Film Comment Selects.") The director, who
left Chile for France during the Pinochet regime, offers
a florid tale of nested fantasies that revolve around war,
imprisonment, exile, and intimate violence. The central
story involves a woman who leaves her seaside villa in an
unnamed country after a fateful encounter with an eternal
child, whose waif-like charms conceal metaphysical
menace and incite threats from bloodthirsty officers.
Ruiz borrows operatic imagery from classic Hollywood
melodramas and ramps up its lurid allure with looming
shadows, shrieking color, Grand Guignol gore, and
outrageous comedy (including a dental exam shown
from inside the mouth looking outward). In Ruiz's self-
consciously extravagant vision, fantasy itself appears both
as a flight from unbearable realities and as a symptom of
unspeakable desires.
In the seventy-three-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci's
first feature in nine years, "Me and You" (Feb. 27), his
familiar unholy trinity of incest, drugs, and bourgeois
corruption comes together in the story of a teen-age boy
from a prosperous Roman family who takes refuge in a
basement. The boy is forced to share his hideout with his
older half-sister, an artist and a heroin addict. Bertolucci's
sly, sleek images distill a lifetime of aesthetic passion and
exalt the very luxury that they deride.
---Richard Brody
Jung Yu-mi plays the title role in Hong Sang-soo's
"Our Sunhi," their sixth collaboration. VIES
ILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN